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Why Corporate Blogs Need PR Strategy
- January 11, 2011 by Marcie Casas
A corporate blog is a great tool for a company to use to control its message and tell its own story, but that is exactly all that it is - a tool. It is a tool that needs to be a component of a much larger strategy that is still PR driven.
While catching up with Social Times, one of my favorite blogs, their latest post about how companies can use a corporate blog to bypass the media proved to be too provocative a topic for this PR girl to pass up commenting on. I shared in a comment on the blog my viewpoint that PR is crucial in the development of a corporate blog. Its function being far more important than being brought in at the end to just promote it.
A corporate blog can be a great tool for telling a company’s story. It places a company in total control of their message and releases it from being completely dependent on the news media for the sharing of its news. But a corporate blog remains only that – just a tool. It’s a tool that is driven by PR and which should be part of a much larger PR strategy.
PR is more than media relations. Under its purview should be any function that speaks to internal and external audiences. A corporate blog meets these criteria, especially when you consider that every view or comment it generates has the potential to lead to a crisis. It’s not unheard of that someone with an alternative agenda hijacks the blog of a company they are in disagreement with or takes content from it to twist and repost on other sites.
To create a corporate blog without involvement from a PR team and without a PR strategy is a crisis in the making. A PR team, engaged from the start, can foresee potential pitfalls and will be prepared to react to sensitive issues as they come up. PR should not be removed completely from the process or brought in at the last moment. Instead, PR needs to have a leading role in strategizing content and messaging for a corporate blog from the get-go.
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